Google Glass browser performance on par with 2-year-old smartphones

R ecently Google released the first web browser for Google Glass, and Explorer Edition owners — like our own Russell Holly — have been taking it for a test drive. How does the Glass browser perform? It’s roughly on par with a smartphone from 2011. That makes sense when you consider Glass uses internals that could have been ripped out of a Droid Bionic. The TI OMAP 4430 processor is a decent performer, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as other SoCs that have launched since. On Google’s modified SunSpider benchmark, the Glass browser clocked a total time of around 2200ms. OMAP 4430 scores have gone as low as 1500ms, so why is Glass so much slower? First, this is the first iteration of the browser. As it’s tuned, the overall time should drop. Second, the OMAP 4430 in Google Glass is probably underclocked to squeeze every last second of life out of its comparatively tiny battery. The Glass browser can’t even keep pace with a no-name Shanzai phone running a Mediatek chip. Since I happened to pick one up recently for around $160, I ran SunSpider to see how it compared. My bulky plastic slab finished its run in just over 930ms. The Galaxy S4 comes in around 200ms faster. The story is the same with Futuremark’s Peacekeeper test. Glass posts a 251 — less than half what my unbranded Chinese phone scored. You might expect better scores from a device that costs nearly ten times as much, but that’s simply not the case. Then again, Glass doesn’t have room for a 3100mAh battery to power a processor that’s clocked to its energy-sucking maximum clock speed. Adventurous tech-lovers who plunked down their hard-earned cash for Google Glass probably didn’t expect it to be the most powerful device around. Glass is many things, but a powerhouse Android device isn’t one of them. Glass is more about the overall experience than it is about performance. The fact that you can now browse the web using it is a nice bonus, and it doesn’t really need to be anything more than that.